Learning to Love Comment Moderation

I’ll bet you never thought you’d see the day when you looked forward to moderating your comments, but this might just be it. Comment moderation has been vastly improved, with all kinds of little tools and changes to help keep things quick and painless.

The Comments menu of your dashboard has a new, beautiful layout. Above the comments queue, you’ll see options to filter by Pending (formerly known as Awaiting Moderation), Approved, and Spam:

Below the text of each comment you’ll find action links, which let you Approve, Mark as Spam, Delete, Edit, Quick Edit, and Reply straight from the dashboard. After you’ve approved a comment, you can also Unapprove. All of these are color coded to help you move along faster than ever.

There’s also a section called In Response To, from which you can:

Click on the number of comments displayed in the talk bubble to filter your comments view to only show comments on that post or page.

Click the title of a post or page to go to the edit view for that post or page.

Click on the # sign that appears next to the comment count to go to the post or page itself, on your blog.

To navigate to a specific comment on your blog, click the timestamp that displays after Submitted On.

You can batch edit comments by checking the boxes that appear next to each title. Then select the action you’d like to take from the Bulk Actions dropdown.

Comments also appear in the Discussion module on the Edit Posts screen. Action links, user info, and a comment permalink all appear here:

Action links also appear in the Recent Comments module on your dashboard, including pending comments, which display as highlighted:

Finally, you can moderate comments using keyboard shortcuts after enabling this feature under My Account > Edit Profile. Use J to go down and K to go up the rows, and use A to approve, S to mark as spam, D to delete, E to edit, and R to reply.

To learn more about what’s new in your new WordPress dashboard, check out this Support page.

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I am seeing a lot of folks lamenting the new changes to wordpress.com but personally I have not found anything that is a big problem, for the most part, I believe you guys have done a great job of it. the comment moderation panel is easy, straight forward, and vastly improved over the latter. It is great, and I have put it to good use here this week and it has made short work out of what used to be a pain in ……. well it wasn’t much fun.

Take two atta boys outta of petty cash for a job well done wordpress.com this is the cat’s meow.

Just one question, how can I add a, for example, youtube video on my sidebar or maybe a flash embed code? The people can play and see the video without open another window. Why isn’t possible add more than one vodpod widget?

is it possible to make the reply comment on the same box of original comment I’m replying too instead of it shows up as a new comment?I’m having a hard time to explain it but I hope you know what I mean. :)

It is much easier except for one thing. The edit and delete buttons right next to each other. Only a matter of time before I deleted a comment, sure enough last night, when tired it happened. I had to copy and paste from the email notification, apologize and reply. Could those two buttons be moved apart?

the only pain is that some comments require approval even though the default setting might be set to require approval if there are 2 or more hyperlinks…when previously comments w/o links were simply posted w/o requiring approval (as determined by the settings) – is this a bug or are we missing something?

also noticed on the Dashboard that the left nav options are hidden behind the Stats graph in Firefox when the Stats module is in the top left spot

On the old dashboard I could allow my regulars to post 1 link without being placed in the moderation queue.
Now, with 2.7, I see the option, yet somehow each and every time they post a link it’s held back.

I had to disable the links limit which is something I’d rather not do.

I just love the new layout, now that I have got used to it it is much more user friendly. But, away from subject, it would be good to have a fluid 3 column theme which also has a customisable header, for me that is the only thing missing…

Heather, when the icon tool bar is minimized to show just the icon, it doesn’t show that there’s a comment waiting in moderation. That’s really about the only improvement I could wish for right now. Can we have an early Hanukkah present? :) Otherwise, loving, loving, loving it.

When will we get threaded comments? You know, so that when someone makes a comment, you can reply to that comment and your reply appears subordinate to that comment? Rather than at the end of all the other comments?

That’d be neat. Even better than rearranging and renaming the buttons on the comment moderation page.

Parts of this is great! And it is easy. I have had nothing but problems with moderating posts with links in them. I did not have this problem before, but since the update it seems that they all need approval.

How about creating the option of inserting an audio file in the article that can be played directly there, just like the youtube videos (and as it is on blogspot.com)? I mean freely, because I know about this option available for money.

Audio can only be uploaded to your Media Library after purchasing the Space Upgrade. However, you can still use the audio player on your blog by linking to an audio file hosted elsewhere. Check out this page in Support for instructions.

But I’m still having trouble to moderate multiple comments at once using opera mini 4.2 phone browser (which I never experienced it with previous design before). I mean, when I approve selected comment(s), sometimes it failed to do so and those comment(s) still pending somehow. It really frustating since I often check and approve some comments from my phone, when I’m away from my PC.

If we think a comment is more appropriated in another post, is there a simple way to move comments from a page to a post?

For example my blog has lots of different specific themes and many people send comments at the bottom of the welcome page (which is an updated static page with links towards all the topics covered) instead of sending the comments on the actual post related to the theme they are talking about. Is it possible to move their comments?

been thinking whether the title is a joke or your were just sarcastic. some +3 weeks ago 95 % of the comments didn’t have to be moderated and life was good (see participation blogs like wednesdaystamper.wordpress.com and others). now it’s reversed and it SUCKS big time! yes, it’s easy to moderate comments now on front of the dashboard, thanks for complicating life for people with jobs and a life away from the pc.